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UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño's 2666 Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1b97k7sz Author Brito, Francisco Publication Date 2018 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 by Francisco Brito A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Francine Masiello, Chair Professor Estelle Tarica Professor Tom McEnaney Summer 2018 The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 ¬ 2018 Francisco Brito 1 Abstract The Invisible Crowd: Individual and Multitude in Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 by Francisco Brito Doctor of Philosophy in Comparative Literature University of California, Berkeley Professor Francine Masiello, Chair This dissertation argues that Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666 offers us a new way of thinking about the relationship between the individual and the multitude in the globalized world. I argue that the novel manages to capture the oppressive nature of its structures not by attempting to represent them directly but instead by telling the stories of individuals who feel especially alienated from them. These characters largely fail to connect with one another in any lasting way, but their brief encounters, some of which take place in person, others through reading, have pride of place in a text that, I propose, constitutes a brief on behalf of the marginal and the forgotten in its overall form: it is an example of the novel as an ever-expanding, multitudinous crowd; it strives to preserve the singularity of each of its members while at the same time suggesting that the differences between them are less important than their shared presence within a single narrative whole. I proceed by examining these characters in all their particularity and closely reading the novel’s key scenes, in which they meet one another, while also tracking how these characters and encounters are paradigmatic of different ways of relating. Chapter 1, “Insufferable Hierarchies,” focuses on 2666’s most bookish characters and their rage for “greatness,” exploring how literature in the novel both enlarges the moral imagination of certain characters and curdles that of others. My second chapter, “Women in the Shape of Monsters,” is centered on the novel’s least bookish stretch, the famous middle section about the murdered women of Santa Teresa. It examines how the fight waged by that section’s living women against gendered violence runs up against patriarchal power and the overwhelming burden of having to represent or avenge their murdered sisters. In “Everything in Anything,” my final chapter, I explore how the novel—itself a storehouse of miscellaneous but true information—allows its characters to form multi- generational and trans-historical bonds through the sharing of random facts and by unsystematic but assiduous reading in marginal spaces. In a brief coda, I argue that 2666’s ethics and poetics require both an openness to the possibility of change and a commitment to one’s particular way of being. i Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Introduction Chapter 1 1 Insufferable Hierarchies Chapter 2 31 Women in the Shape of Monsters Chapter 3 75 Everything in Anything Coda 109 Poetry Between Cardenal and Parra Works Cited 113 ii Acknowledgments In the spirit of 2666, I’d like to thank the many wonderful people who helped me with this project by recalling small moments we’ve shared that have made camp my memory. Francine Masiello gave me an encyclopedia of advice and support, but I’m especially grateful for the time I visited her office and she enjoined me to stop reading already and to start writing. Estelle Tarica, for the time she testified to how her faith in Arguedas gets her through her fears that literature makes nothing happen. Tom McEnaney, for the moment of peace up on Tightwad Hill when we got to catch our breath after our football game fee hike protest. Ramsey McGlazer, for the conversation about Spivak and Rawls in that open-air bar in Guanajuato (you were right). Ashley Brock, for her candid words about teaching and Labrador retrievers on a bench near Sproul. Emily Drumsta, for looking at the Bay with a wild surmise from the top of the Campanile on visiting weekend. Mandy Cohen, for that collaboration on our cohort’s conference CFP. Katie Kadue, for rapping on a table at Babette with me and making Hannah Arendt appear. Marianne Kaletzky, for the Halloween we taught together and you played Vallejo’s breadwinner to my Grand Inquisitor. Jane Raisch, for your enthusiasm in recommending Karinthy’s Metropole. Julia Nelsen, for the blissed-out conversation on the way back to BART after we saw The Clock at SF MOMA. Keith Budner, for making the only homemade pollo a la brasa I’ve ever had. Kathryn Crim, for every Marxist muffin, scone, and wolverine at the Cheeseboard. Sam England, for that one Clásico after which he bought me sausages and taught me about recycling. Derin McLeod, for helping me think through what is to be done on his grandfather’s balcony. Luis Antonio Campos, for taking me to Sete Lagoas to see Galo play live for the first time. Jay Hepner, for the burned CD of Tusk and the (correct) prediction that I would one day appreciate it. Tom McSorley, for the time we tried, and failed to see pay our respects at Highgate. Will Martin, for the nights digging up and playing old records on WHRB. Pedro Brito, por darme un libro de tapa roja con unos vaqueros en la tapa y decirme que lo tenía que leer. Charo Núñez de Brito, por escribir el poema, “Peor es nada,” que me llevo hasta la meta. Andrea Brito Núñez, for never ceasing to wonder with me what he sez to Mabel, he sez. Hannah Wagner, for scalping tickets and singing and dancing at Tegan and Sara. Noah Bonnheim, for talking through new family matters at Vik’s Chaat. Anne Wagner, for ensuring that I got the sunglasses that I now clearly see I should’ve gotten long before. Bill Wagner, for the morning walk up the hill on the eve of graduation. John Wagner and Lisa Waters, for the mythography of Scooby, whom I will one day meet. I’d also like to thank my students and co-teachers at both Berkeley and the Prison University Project at San Quentin for teaching me the importance of thinking and learning together as well as all the people at both institutions—managers and custodial staff, librarians and tutors— without whom education wouldn’t be possible. And so I come to Laura Wagner, who embodies those attitudes that are so difficult to reconcile: an open generosity to the world and an unstinting self-reliance. I couldn’t be more grateful that I get to share so many books, meals, songs, trips, stories, and conversations with her. iii Introduction A Book of Encounters 2666 is a massive complex of novels populated by a wealth of characters. With one exception, central in several ways, it tells the stories of writers of different kinds: academic critics, a philosopher, a journalist, a very enigmatic novelist. It tells their stories without, however, attempting to represent the larger field of cultural production. When it makes connections, it makes them between isolated individuals, never between communities or institutions. Its first two novel-length sections are about academics, but the novel is utterly unconcerned with the university. And the writer whose biography it concludes with is unsocial to the point of unworldliness. 2666 covers much geographic and historical ground but it does so while tightly fixed on its individual characters. Its thousand pages contain no accounts of great public events of any kind. It certainly reckons with the aftermath of mass violence, but it doesn’t depict it; the act of horror is perpetually held right beyond the edge of the narrative frame. Its thematic concerns might be world-historical but its storytelling method is stringently intimate. This dissertation is about this paradoxical narrative individualism. It examines how a book with such a broad range of stories featuring so many different people and so evidently concerned with the particular places and times in which these stories take place can simultaneously give the impression that what ultimately matters is the destiny of the isolated individual. My main contention about the novel is that its great pathos derives from this central tension between the sense the reader has that this book, when considered as a whole, teems with life, and the individual narratives of death-haunted solitude that make it up. 2666 is so difficult to read because it’s an unforgiving depiction of how rotten and cruel our world is that appears to offer very little hope that it can be radically changed. At no point in its ocean of stories is there any moment at which one feels that the tide is turning and that a different world is possible. Jean Franco, in her essay “Questions for Bolaño,” puts this forcefully when she contrasts Bolaño’s work with that of writer-activists who clearly believe that “action to right wrongs can be meaningful” (216). I concede that concerted right action is almost wholly absent from the story world of 2666, but I don’t ultimately agree that the book amounts to a nihilistic celebration of a march into an abyss (to use the figure that Franco borrows from the phantasmagoric ending to Bolaño’s novella Amuleto).